4000 Images - The Rest Of The Story

After last Wednesday's story - "4000 Images In The Workflow - How Do I Do It?" - several friends of the blog left comments which I thought needed some clarification. So, read the article if you missed it and here are a few more salient points of interest. Just hit the "Read More..." link for the rest of the story.

1. Renaming my images - what's my nomenclature? It's pretty simple - if I'm shooting Mary Smith's Wedding, it's say "2134_Smith W08" - Seq#_+Client Last Name+Job Type+Year. Job types are as follows; B=Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah, S=Senior, P=Portrait, C=Commercial, and Z=Personal. I wish I would have started with the W08 first many years ago - jobs would have sorted easier on the hard drives. But hey, it's still not a big deal. So, if you're just getting started, I'd recommend first listing the year and then job type second as in 2008W.

2. How much tweaking do I do in Lightroom? Probably too much some time. Lightroom - it's still new to me and I like playing with the buttons and sliders /learning the functionality so I have to work at my own self discipline here. I only crop a very few amount of images, maybe just 5 - no more - we will do that in post production. As far as color balance, I try to do a reasonably good job on that. A quick sample of a neutral if necessary coupled with a slight warming with the "Color Temp" slider usually does the job. Then just hit the "Sync" button to do the rest of the job.

I like Lightroom to get me to "second base" in my color management. We'll wrap the retouching and enhancement tasks in Photoshop on the client's final selected images. Oh, by the way - I can't stand the auto-exposure button in Lightroom. I think it's mostly a landmine to ruin good images. To be honest, I have never liked anything auto-adjusted in Lightroom - NO offense Adobe.

3. After getting the the edited images tweaked, I export them as high res Jpegs as mentioned last week. The exported images have a new sequence number appended to the front of the current image name. They are then brought into ProSelect for client presentation. I'll cover ProSelect and the sales process in a future post.

4. Lastly, Do I sell a CD of images to my clients? O.K. you asked - where is my soapbox - NEVER, NEVER, did I say NEVER!! To my way of thinking, folks, that is the simply the most effective way to neuter your sale and potentially create a very negative impact on your business. I'll cover that in a future rant too.

Anyway, I hope that helps clear-up any of the confusion.

Well gang, I'm still on vacation so I'm out of here for today. See ya' tomorrow with "How To Run Your Business - Annapolis Style."

Have a great one, -David